Great War Poetry

[Boreenatra]

Does anyone have any advice about poetry concerning the Great War period, but written from a modern day perspective. Any good tomes published recently? Looking as part of research into modern day views of WW1. Did try the forum search feature but couldn't find anything relevant. Regards Steve.

[Dragon]

Steve, do you want poetry written now about the Great War, or criticism , or both?

I can suggest several individual poems and will append a list if it helps. I would not post the text of contemporary poems, because of copyright issues, but I'd be happy to scan and email. Can you say why you need them?

Have you seen The Faber Book of War Poetry ed Kenneth Baker? It's excellent and includes war poetry from the Ancient Greeks onward.

Gwyn

[Boreenatra]

Dear Gwyn. Thanks for your reply. Looking for stuff written now. I know there's a lot of WW2 poetry about but it seems that a lot of " war poetry" could be applied to any conflict, but with 90 years passing I was interested in criticism and a reflective perception of the events of the great war. Also a view from WW2 as to the events of WW1. I find that a poetic perspective would always include a more personal point of view rather than just a regurgitation or repetition of facts, most of which are fairly well documented.Also, because my research into my wife's G Grandfather has taken us back to Ireland, an Irish viewpoint would also help.The research is part of a much wider dissertation into views of the 20th Century from the 21st. I've got the Faber book you mentioned,and thank you for the email offer,however if you have any personal recommendations as to books, that would suffice.Other people's favorites are always a good point to further a discussion but one man's meat etc. etc. Regards Steve P.S. I like your Ivor Gurney quote.

[Dragon]

thank you for the email offer,however if you have any personal recommendations as to books, that would suffice.Other people's favorites are always a good point to further a discussion but one man's meat etc. etc.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I wasn’t offering to contribute my favourites. I was offering poems written by modern poets using the Great War as a theme.

I merely thought that as many modern poets’ work is still in their own editions, that suggestions and perhaps copies of poems extracted from these might be helpful. It seems to me to be intellectually more robust to read the work initially in the context in which the poet first published it. Otherwise, however one glosses it, criteria of some sort have been applied in the selection.

Any anthology is simply a collection of someone else’s choices, surely.

Good luck with the dissertation.

Gwyn

[swizz]

There are a few poems by Belfast-based poet Michael Longley which deal with an Ulster dimension. I think there are one or two in his 'The Weather in Japan'. Here's one called Wounds, which links the war to the present-day Troubles:

Here are two pictures from my father’s head—

I have kept them like secrets until now:

First, the Ulster Division at the Somme

Going over the top with ‘**** the Pope!’

‘No Surrender!’: a boy about to die,

Screaming ‘Give ’em one for the Shankill!’

‘Wilder than Gurkhas’ were my father’s words

Of admiration and bewilderment.

Next comes the London-Scottish padre

Resettling kilts with his swagger-stick,

With a stylish backhand and a prayer.

Over a landscape of dead buttocks

My father followed him for fifty years.

At last, a belated casualty,

He said — lead traces flaring till they hurt —

‘I am dying for King and Country, slowly.’

I touched his hand, his thin head I touched.

Now, with military honours of a kind,

With his badges, his medals like rainbows,

His spinning compass, I bury beside him

Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of

Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.

A packet of Woodbines I throw in,

A lucifer, the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Paralysed as heavy guns put out

The night-light in a nursery for ever;

Also a bus-conductor’s uniform—

He collapsed beside his carpet-slippers

Without a murmur, shot through the head

By a shivering boy who wandered in

Before they could turn the television down

Or tidy away the supper dishes.

To the children, to a bewildered wife,

I think ‘Sorry Missus’ was what he said.

Seamus Heaney has written at least one about the Irish 'war poet' Francis Ledwidge.

In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge

Seamus Heaney

Field Work

Pub. 1979, Faber & Faber Ltd.

The bronze soldier hitches a bronze cape

That crumples stiffly in imagined wind

No matter how the real winds buff and sweep

His sudden hunkering run, forever craned

Over Flanders. Helmet and haversack,

The gun's firm slope from butt to bayonet,

The loyal, fallen names on the embossed plaque --

It all meant little to the worried pet

I was in nineteen forty-six or seven,

Gripping my Aunt Mary by the hand

Along the Portstewart prom, then round the crescent

To thread the Castle Walk out to the strand.

The pilot from Coleraine sailed to the coal-boat.

Courting couples rose out of the scooped dunes.

A farmer stripped to his studs and shiny waistcoat

Rolled the trousers down on his timid shins.

At night when coloured bulbs strung out the sea-front

Country voices rose from a cliff-top shelter

With news of a great litter - "we'll pet the runt!" -

And barbed wire that had torn a friesian's elder.

Francis Ledwidge, you courted at the seaside

Beyond Drogheda one Sunday afternoon.

Literary, sweet-talking, countrified,

You pedalled out the leafy road from Slane

Where you belonged, among the dolorous

And lovely: the May altar of wild flowers,

Easter water sprinkled in outhouses,

Mass-rocks and hill-top raths and raftered byres.

I think of you in your Tommy's uniform,

A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave,

Ghosting the trenches with a bloom of hawthorn

Or silence cored from a Boyne passage-grave.

It's summer, nineteen-fifteen. I see the girl

My aunt was then, herding on the long acre.

Behind a low bush in the Dardanelles

You suck stones to make your dry mouth water.

It's nineteen-seventeen. She still herds cows,

But a big strafe puts the candles out in Ypres:

'My soul is by the Boyne, cutting new meadows...

My country wears her confirmation dress.'

'To be called a British soldier while my country

has no place among nations...' You were rent

By shrapnel six weeks later. 'I am sorry

That party politics should divide our tents.'

In you, our dead enigma, all the strains

Criss-cross in useless equilibrium

And as the wind tunes through this vigilant bronze

I hear again the sure confusing drum

You followed from Boyne water to the Balkans

But miss the twilit note your flute should sound.

You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones

Though all of you consort now underground.

I'm sure there are others but these are the two that come to mind. Hope they're the sort of thing you're looking for.

Swizz

[Tim Godden]

Steve,

In my final year I produced a small collection of poetry all related to The Great War. If they can be of use to you let me know. I studied under George Szirtes, a poet you may well have heard of in his own right.

All the best in your research,

Tim Godden

[marina]

WOW! to both those poems - thanks, Swizz.

Marina

[Boreenatra]

Dear All .Thank you so much for your replies.Gwyn, please email me any poems or extracts that you have, and likewise Tim. Swizz, great stuff, thanks so much.I agree with you Gwyn about the anthology thing but seeing collections of work side by side as it were, would help me gain an overview so I can draw my own conclusions!!! The only thing I knew about George Szirtes was The Slant Door, but interestingly my brother in law came to this country from Budapest a couple of years after GZ and he settled in Sheffield and he seems to think he knew some of his family. Thanks to all for your input and again any help greatly appreciated. Regards Steve.

[swizz]

No problem. Ledwidge is quite interesting in his own right and is enjoying something of a renaissance as Ireland's 'war poet'. He was friendly with some of the leaders of the Easter Rising and I quite like the first bit of a poem he wrote in memory of one of them (Thomas MacDonagh):

He shall not hear the bittern cry

In the wild sky, where he is lain

Interesting that he's buried in the same cemetery as the Welsh poet Hedd Wyn (Artillery Wood, near Ypres).

Swizz

[Dragon]

This is a semi serious question. What would you do if people reading this thread offered your their own published or unpublished poetry?

(And no, I am not offering mine. You wouldn't like it and nor would other Forum users.)

Gwyn

[Boreenatra]

Read them. I for one would be interested in Forum members poems because it's exactly the type of personal reflections i'm interested in.None of this is in a professional capacity, but apart from works from people involved in the Great War, I can't think of too many other folks who would be so qualified as our own members,who most if not all must have their own thoughts on WW1. Regards Steve

[Steve Bramley]

Steve,

'The Oxford Book of War Poetry'

By John Stallworthy.

Is an,

'excellent selection arranged chronologically by conflict'

says the blurb, and I agree.

There are poems written from the perspective that you require by,

Ted Hughes

Philip Larkin

T.S. Eliot

Ezra Pound

G.K. Chesterton

Vernon Scannel

Douglas Dunn

Herbert Read

and others,

Regards,

Steve.

[Boreenatra]

Steve. Thanks for your reply. A favourite of mine is Isaac Rosenberg. His Break of Day in the Trenches is very good. Interesting site worthy of inspection is http://www.familyrecords.gov.uk/focuson/ro...erg/pre-war.htm Regards Steve.

[swizz]

I remembered that Michael Longley had another poem about visiting the former Western Front. Here it is:

The War Graves

The exhausted cathedral reaches nowhere near the sky

As though behind its buttresses wounded angels

Snooze in a halfway house of gargoyles, rainwater

By the mouthful, broken wings among pigeons' wings.

There will be no end to clearing up after the war

And only an imaginary harvest-home where once

The Germans drilled holes for dynamite, for fieldmice

To smuggle seeds and sow them inside these columns.

The headstones wipe out the horizon like a blizzard

And we can see no farther than the day they died,

As though all of them died together on the same day

And the war was that single momentous explosion.

Mothers and widows pruned these roses yesterday,

It seems, planted sweet william and mowed the lawn

After consultations with the dead, heads meeting

Over this year's seed catalogues and packets of seeds.

Around the shell holes not one poppy has appeared,

No symbolic flora, only the tiny whitish flowers

No one remembers the names of in time, brookweed

And fairy flax, say, lamb's lettuce and penny-cress.

In mine craters so vast they are called after cities

Violets thrive, as though strewn by each cataclysm

To sweeten the atmosphere and conceal death's smell

With a perfume that vanishes as soon as it is found.

At the Canadian front line permanent sandbags

And duckboards admit us to the underworld, and then

With the beavers we surface for long enough to hear

The huge lamentations of the wounded caribou.

Old pals in the visitors' book at Railway Hollow

Have scribbled 'The severest spot. The lads did well'

'We came to remember', and the woodpigeons too

Call from the wood and all the way from Accrington.

I don't know how Rifleman Parfitt, Corporal Vance,

Private Costello of the Duke of Wellingtons,

Driver Chapman, Topping, Atkinson, Duckworth,

Dorrell, Wood come to be written in my diary.

For as high as we can reach we touch-read the names

Of the disappeared, and shut our eyes and listen to

Finches' chitters and a blackbird's apprehensive cry

Accompanying Charles Sorley's monumental sonnet.

We describe the comet at Edward Thomas's grave

And, because he was a fisherman, that headlong

Motionless deflection looks like a fisherman's fly,

Two or three white after-feathers overlapping.

Geese on sentry duty, lambs, a clattering freight train

And a village graveyard encompass Wilfred Owen's

Allotment, and there we pick from a nettle bed

One celandine each, the flower that outwits winter.

[Boreenatra]

Thanks Swizz. A real countrymans poem. Again it looks from another perspective, still asking why, but not really needing an answer. Thanks again for your time. Regards Steve.

[Tim Godden]

Steve (and of course everyone else too!),

Here is one of my own poems related to The First World War;

Battlefield Tours

Growing feet trampled off

From the orange-brown explosion

Of nineteen-seventies decor catalogues

Onto the yellowing grass and awakened dust.

Filing through the aching white rows

The forced silence broken only

By a whispered giggle

Or a mock cough by the class joker.

The restless party drew up to

A list of names engraved on a wall

Whiter than the knees of

Most looking on.

A boy, in a red cap,

Was thrust into the limelight

And on tip toes pointed,

Smiling, at the name high above.

The party dispersed from the

Towering names and

Reformed in their own stiff columns

Leaving just the dust to settle.

I am the name on the wall

You came to visit that day,

No one had come before you,

And no one has been since.

The dust that rose that day

still blows my way,

from time to time.

But I wish you would come again,

just to say hello,

or even, this time,

goodbye.

Well there it is.

All the best,

Tim

[spike10764]

A very good poem Tim. Thanks for sharing it .

[Michelle Young]

Steve

Apparently Beacons of Remembrance by Jean M Bingham is a good book of modern Great War poetry.

Regards, Michelle

[Boreenatra]

Thank for all your replies. Your poem Tim was exactly the type of thing I was interested in. Perhaps a collection of poems by Forum members could be put together, after all we would seem to be very well qualified.Thanks again. Regards Steve.

[Tim Godden]

Thanks Spike.

No problem Steve, I do have a few others you may be interested in. Just let me know.

Cheers,

Tim

[jon_armstrong]

Another modern Great War poem...

The Constant Tin Soldier by UA Fanthorpe

From: UA Fanthorpe, "Selected Poems", Penguin, 1986.

[Graham-McAdam]

I've just had a look at Andrew Motion's "First World War Poems" from Faber. As well as all the classics, it comes right up to date with some super pieces by Vernon Scannell, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Glyn Maxwell. I know what your question is, and yes, there are a couple of women earlier in the sequence - May Sinclair and Charlotte Mew. In answer to your next question, yes, you can buy it cheap on Amazon.

Must go off and read some poetry!

Cheers

Graham